De set komt volgens showrunner David Benioff niet uit de computer: “It was maybe the the biggest challenge [production designer] Deborah Riley faced and was probably the [set] we were most nervous about. It’s really easy to go into a big sci-fi territory. It’s really a testament to Deb. She designed both the audience chamber, where it’s a grand room where Dany sits on her bench, and her personal quarters at top of the pyramid — they’re just gorgeous. Incredibly experienced crew people were gasping.”

Hij vervolgde: “More and more things are CG. But we’ve done these lavish huge sets and there something old Hollywood about that that I love. As much as we have an incredible [special effects] team, the best in the world, and we rely on them for so many things, for the actors there’s something different about walking into a real environment and being in a room that has the power you’re trying to convey. It’s almost like the way cathedrals were designed to create awe. If you were a peasant and been working in fields your whole life and never seen a city, you’d walk into a cathedral for the first time and you walk inside and that’s a religious experience — because you’ve never seen anything like this.”

“The White Walkers are obviously this threat that’s looming over the whole world of the show, whether or not anybody knows it. We know it, and we wanted to delve deeper into their world, but we wanted to do it in sort of a specific way. Having grown up as a kid watching some of the old monster movies, you realize that the most effective, mysterious, horrible things were the ones that remained mysterious; that the more you showed of something, the less mysterious and horrible and the more sort of mundane it started to seem. So we really wanted to just take people very deep into their world, but in a way that preserved the fundamental mystery of that world.”

“Part of it was just something that we were always very curious about. The very first time we saw Craster leave a baby in Season 2, you’re wondering what the h*** that’s all about. You see the White Walker take it. Are the White Walkers going to eat the babies? Are they going to sacrifice them in some kind of ritual? What happens? We love the idea there was one last baby Craster had fathered before he died, and it’s a moment that, while not in the books, is kind of suggested by the books and a moment that we thought would be really fun to illustrate in a horrifying way. And it was actually pretty horrifying.”